iPhone Notes at the 4/26/24 Spanish Love Songs and Oso Oso show, at Warsaw in Brooklyn
i wrote this on my iphone notes while at the show tonight except the addendum, which i added while on my laptop at a kratom bar after the show had ended.
iPhone Notes at the 4/26/24 Spanish Love Songs and Oso Oso show, at Warsaw in Brooklyn
I bought two tickets last minute to the Spanish Love Songs and Oso Oso show in Brooklyn earlier today. My girlfriend, Elspeth, is sick with “long covid.” I ended up going alone, which was fine. I’m at that point in your 20s where, for the most part, if you’re seeing your favorite bands, you’re gonna be alone.
Two security guards discussing shoes, specifically Dr. Scholl’s(?) brand that seems to be great for working events. Non-slip, fashionable, less than $100. They discuss this for the four minutes I smoke outside before Oso Oso starts and are continuing to discuss as I go inside.
Manager of the venue shows up to tell security guards, as I’m walking away, “There’s beer cans or whatever all around outside. Can you do something about it?”
Sydney Sprague, one of the opening acts, is not who I thought she was.
Initially, I thought she was Emily Sprague, who played my house at 126A Waller in 2016(?) as part of the Pinegrove Ping Pong (Pingus) tour.
My older friend at the time, an ex-boyfriend of a major ex-girlfriend of mine who I’ll speak more on later, N., spent the whole night hitting on Emily Sprague in front of T. (said ex-girlfriend), in ways I found cruel.
I would do the same kind of things, later, as we started to date later in college — the same alcohol drinking, shitty, abuser — even if I ended up white collar instead of a line cook.
N. and I were coworkers in college. We worked at a restaurant together: I was a dishwasher, then an expo window worker. He was a line cook, now a sous chef.
I last saw Spanish Love Songs in Louisville, maybe in 2018, at a dive bar where I was the only attendee with my coworker (co-intern at the time).
We both worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers as audit interns.
We were equally useless in the company’s grand strategy for financial dominance, until we graduated. I was the only person screaming along to the songs, although I saw my friend mouth some of the words.
From my understanding, this show (Warsaw, Brooklyn NY in 2024) is sold-out. Spanish Love Songs is the “real Headliner,” based on what another attendee told me when I asked about the headliner.
Six years is eternity.
Their most popular song, based on Spotify, is from a new album. The song is called “Haunted”.
I’ve recently, for at least 6 months now, been majorly depressive to the extent of suicidal ideation and almost-action. Part of this is due to reading/exposing myself more heavily to Derrida (and, by extension, Fisher’s) writings on hauntology. This is my own fault.
I’ve considered suicide, practically and planned, four times since November 2023. Each time, I took my medicine and laid down with my love, which was sufficient to make those feelings go away.
Isn’t that all a modern depressive needs to hold onto this world? Pharmaceuticals and feeling like you’re in a womb.
Wifi at ‘Warsaw’ in Brooklyn, is labeled “Free-Fan_Wifi”. It looks like a scam, but seems to really be their wifi. At our apartment in Bushwick, we did a lazy name not dissimilar to Warsaw’s, “Free Public Wifi.”
‘Haunted’ by Spanish Love Songs is a song I did not hear until today, in my car to pick up my sickly girlfriend from an urgent care appointment. The lyrics seem to be directed to people like myself: You’re not haunted / You just miss everything, the chorus accuses.
I’ve felt accused for much of my life — both by other people (mainly loved ones) and by God. Why? I don’t know. I’m a guilty guy. I’m a guy that took a long time to figure out the extent of my outward bullshit.
For most of my life, I’ve just drank alcohol and typically ignored or outright ran away from issues that arise. To reference The Wonder Years, I am always looking for tears in a screen door.
You’re not a ghost / so stop disappearing, Dylan Slocum, lead guitarist and vocalist, yells.
He is right. I know he is right. Why can I not escape the idea that he’s wrong, just in a moment of mania? His voice—authoritative, older (wiser), a survivor of time—why do I doubt survivors of my own woes? Should I not, practically, follow these lines?
The first song I ever heard by Spanish Love Songs was by chance, by referral on an internet emo music forum, their song “Buffalo Buffalo,” off their 2018 album Schmaltz. I’m not sure when Spanish Love Songs became such a big band, but they did, and that is good.
In that song “Buffalo Buffalo,” Dylan screams Some asshole shot up some kids a week before you left for Portland / I’m thinking of dying again and, in the late 2010s, a mentally unwell undergrad accountant, I felt those lines personally in the depths of a benzo addiction, partly entering psychosis in the deepest portions.
It was true: I was tired of hearing mass violence as a movie performing in front of my face each day through iPhone news apps. I wanted to kill myself. Half of my writing, looking back on it, from 2015 to 2019, was just about school shootings and memes.
What has changed since then, since 2018 when “Schmaltz” was released?
Later, in the same song, the line which stuck for me for six years, Dylan states, I thought about buying a gun…
And I did. In 2021, I purchased a .44 revolver and kept it near me in all new locations I moved into. It wasn’t so much as protection from the world which continually gave me anxiety, but an immediate exit when the world becomes too much.
I did buy a gun. I did keep it with me, until the past year or so.
When I look out at the crowd, I feel aged into oblivion. It’s like looking at the same photo that Jack sees in The Shining. The same kids, the same people, forever alright. I just don’t feel like I’m in the photo anymore, or maybe I can’t recognize which person in the crowd that I am – I wanted to be the same, forever alright.
Jade, lead singer of Oso Oso, asks if we’re all having fun. I am crying, singing along to “The View,” a song I overly romanticized, a long time ago.
Oso Oso, although co-headerliner, is the first co-headliner. They are before Spanish Love Songs. I came, mainly, to see Oso Oso. They are, aside from The Wonder Years, my favorite band of all time.
I am tearing up screaming, alone, the words of the songs, Apathy / I was in love with it he remorses on “The View.” I remember the night the album came out.
I was driving around Lexington, KY with a great love of my life, a girl I dated for 3 years, her name is C.. We were attempting to reconcile our breakup two years prior — trying to find something magical in the new album by Oso Oso, aptly titled “Basking in The Glow.”
And, as God witnessed, I did believe it — I believed the lyrics of “One Sick Plan” off the new album in particular. We spoke for weeks, we held one another for the first time since we had broken up.
But will it ever be enough / To have some free time and some stuff / No I need heaven, I need you / I need your perfect point of view.
I did believe I was overcoming apathy, the depressive nature of my younger self (how silly is it, to, at 20, referto ‘your younger self’?!)
I would fix things with C., I wanted this.
It was 2019. I just graduated. I had just broken up with a girl that had taken over C.’s spot in my heart a year prior. It was, for all intents and purposes, the words I needed to hear to reconcile, to rebuild, to go on.
In 2021, two years after that drive and album listen which I thought would fix my life, the secondary guitarist of Oso Oso, Tavish Malonely, would die in a tragic wreck involving their tour van.
It was then that I started to discount that 2019 album, discounting the words I had initially found so special. Time doesn’t care about words or hearts. I began to know this in my soul. I hadn’t spoken to C. for years, by that point—it was just a nail in an already buried coffin.
Outside of the scope of this review of a show, is the love I once had for a girl named C., who lived in Lexington, KY and was one year younger than myself. She never went to college, but she introduced me to everything I have ever loved, things that keep me from killing myself each year, even today.
Our first date was attempting to open a wine bottle without a wine opener, in my dorm, at the University of Kentucky, in late 2015. Three years we were together, but it has always felt like three decades in my memory. I remember parking each night in the student lot after dropping her at her apartment, freezing cold, walking the mile back to my dorm, then calling her to let her know I finished my walk.
The first time I backpacked abroad, in 2018, Oso Oso’s “Yunahon Mixtape,” was effectively my travel album. I listened to that album—while wandering the oft-forgotten Polish/Slovak Tatras, the dying rave culture of Berlin, the seemingly infinite trains—so many times.
My favorite Oso Oso song, “The Walk,” from Yunahon Mixtape — I had sorely over-relied upon emotionally while traveling. The song, an imaginary scene between two people on a beach, misunderstanding one another.
A nervous, non-talkative young man, clearly in love, to the extent of erasing anything else around him: The freckles in your face / My head in outer space / The devil in our frame / And I couldn’t believe / You were wasting your time with me
His counterpart, and focus of his affection, a girl who’s response serves as the bridge, making a metaphor about sand that seems, at first, to be callous: No shoes on our feet / You said the sand underneath / is like the people we might meet / “… every single grain, will someday be washed away”
The narrator’s response, one of my favorite sequences in emo music, is an embarrassing plea, almost drunken wailing as an outro: But I said / “If I’m sand, what’s the oceans? / The wind? And erosion? / The lightning and the rain? / And how come we feel pain?”
The girl’s statement of sand was far from callous. It was a celebration — of all the grains of sand on a beach, of the billions of social interactions, how beautiful it is that they share this time together, even if it is temporary. The narrator, realizing how he had ruined the memory, screaming And I’ve realized I was so wrong once again / Just misinterpreting everything you said... into the ending of the song.
Yunahon is a fictional album, a dreamscape of Jade’s. It was, from my understanding, his attempt at crafting a completely made up New Englandisque Beach Town full of love/sorrow/drama (don’t we all, as writers, sometimes attempt something like this about where we are from? don’t we all dream of writing the piece which perfectly illustrates the ideal place in which we were raised?)
Originally raised in Long Island, a mecca for emo music throughout the 2000s, it seemed a love letter to a place that never existed except in a memory, or maybe in the mutated form of a memory via a dream.
It was released, without any press at all, on Bandcamp, in 2017. I remember seeing it on the ‘new arrivals’ for emo music.
I remember Elliott, my bestfriend, who is now married with child and house, getting me onto it. I gave him a signed copy of the CD one year later, after seeing Oso Oso live, in Chicago. He had just purchased his home, not yet been married, but I wanted to give him an artifact, something to signify that he will always be my best friend, time be damned.
Oso Oso, in the present day here in New York, fake closes with “The Cool,” the opening to Yunahon. In the song, Jade laments, in the closing line, The next disaster is just around the bend…
Around me, inside Warsaw, I see hundreds of faces of possible friends, some community I’m just out of reach from. Maybe due to a difference in age, due to my own nervousness about approaching strangers, due to anything I can come up with to blame it on.
I once had a group of friends, in my late teens and early 20s, that would drive 5, even 6 hours just to see a show. All childhood friends.
I’m, as of 2024, 27 years old. Those moments, those shared bodies screaming and sweating onto one another in songs that we all knew, seem like a scene from an old TV show I saw growing up. I cannot imagine the horror generated from the ephemerality of those memories, when it hits a decade just three years from now.
I am terrified by it. I am terrified they will become less real. I am terrified that the measurement of a ‘decade’ holds so much more power than simply counting the years. I know that it’s the same, but I anticipate the disaster of the change in terminology regardless.
Time, more-so than heartbreak or love, has always been the dominant theme of the emo genre. The breaking of a heart, the loss of a friend, the memory of that *one party* from so long ago… all just means to address temporality, making sense of the past and—attempting—to resuscitate those events into the modern day or to eulogize them. It is rare to hear future-focused emo lyricism.
The first few times I saw Oso Oso, twice in Chicago, once in Los Angeles—the crowds were small enough to speak to Jade. He would work his merch table, along with the other guys in the band.
It always gave me a moment of elation, when he’d begin to recall my name, then address me as Jiv without me saying. A fan with an easily memorable name, with an indefinite ethnicity, with a baby cheek face. I remember telling everyone I knew. It was maybe one of the only times in my life I have felt special.
I once hosted shows at my townhouse in college—Elliott named the house “Hollow Earth House,” and we were always a fake venue, just like a hollow earth. Our bookings only came from me messaging artists on Twitter, practically begging them to come to the middle of Kentucky.
And a lot of artists did, Pinegrove played the week before they went on Good Morning America! Florist, just after getting listed as a top ten album by Pitchfork, also stopped by on a tour. I felt, then, that time was just something humans had invented to manage and record resources. I didn’t know that time was integral in life. That it exists, regardless of if we’re seeing it pass. I was young, and still as naive as I am today.
The actual closer tonight for Oso Oso, “Reindeer Games,” was the breakout hit of Yunahon. It has a catchy chorus (I mean if you want / we can just stay here!…) and a cute pun… (I can be your reindeer!)
I’ve always seen it as a song lacking in lyrical depth, for a long time my least favorite song of Yunahon, until tonight, at this specific age in this specific city. I do wish, very often, I had stayed. Wherever that may have been. Whenever it was. The optimistic and wishing portion of an emo album — the song that gives you an answer so clear and definitive, that you’ll see it as cheesy at first.
I’m outside smoking, writing this review live. I’m towards the end of the smoking section, waiting for a band member, hopefully Jade, to walk out of the staff entrance leading to their vans. I want him to recognize me — I don’t want to talk, or get an autograph, or to ask to interview him. I just wanted him, very selfishly, to remember me and say Hi Jiv.
He doesn’t come out, after three Newports. I’m just a late 20s guy, typing away into my Notes app. Waiting for Spanish Love Songs to set up. It’s a curse to have expectations—of any kind.
I’m no longer current with emo music, specifically American/ Midwestern emo. I still listen to all the same bands that were big when I was in college, part of the Third(?) Emo Revival or whatever the hell it ended up being called.
I stopped browsing forums, groups, anything, after I started work at Pricewaterhouse. It had seemed like a LARP to me — to be middle management and somehow think I still had these feelings. How can a PMC be into anything remotely punk?
Regardless, I did still have those emotions lingering. I fully broke with C. the summer of 2019 when I had graduated — there would be no idyllic Yunahon for us in the following years. We had different lives to lead. I had broken both of our hearts for the rest of time, and to my knowledge, there doesn’t seem to be a device to reverse this nor am I looking for it to be invented.
I would be a liar, something I’ve oft-been called in my life, if I acted as if that decision isn’t one I regret.
After Oso Oso, I end up standing on the balcony. No longer in the pit or up front. Just out of breath. Doomed to being a smoker.
Spanish Love Songs goes onto stage, plays a few new songs. I enjoy them without knowing any of the lyrics. Dylan says “We’re going to play a few old songs,” and I listen. What’s tough is that I don’t remember a lot of the songs. I remember only two: “Beer & Nyquil” and “Buffalo Buffalo.”
The first, “Beer & Nyquil,” I remember listening to in 2020, then living in Chicago. I was at work, external auditor for a company that, at the time, was the largest property & casualty company in the world.
Most of my work involved speaking with claims adjusters or actuaries — workers who, as part of their job, had to entirely detach themselves from human suffering. By association, I tried to do the same during my time in Chicago.
I remember reading a graphic, almost comically unreal claim worth $10m that showed up as an exception on my audit testing. A special needs girl, left at a hotel during a festival by her parents, had somehow wandered out of the hotel, gotten brutalized and gangraped by partygoers outside to the extent of being non-verbal.
The hotel, liable for her protection per the court case, had initiated their insurance claim. I was looking into why the $10m case had a difference of $8,000,000 on their financial loss reserves.
I remember discussing the claim with claims adjusters and actuaries, who discussed the case with the mathematical detachment only management could do. Later in the night, certainly after midnight once my adderall was losing steam, in their office in the Loop in downtown Chicago—I remember hearing “Beer & Nyquil” on my Spotify mix: I want to be the one / I want to know what I love /I want to hold it together / But that’s not an option anymore.
By that point in my early 20s, it was true to a degree. I had started dating T. (mentioned earlier), who had also moved to Chicago post-grad, and the early indications of my inevitable alcoholism began to appear.
Alcoholism, as an aside, is a disease that I find makes chaos of time. It isn’t a cure for time’s passing: it is a band-aid followed by painkillers.
It will let you relive your happiest moments—but only as a specter!—while hyper-fixating on a future filled with turmoil—but only as if you’re really there! The present becomes nothing but dialogue, nothing but filler. Current time just ceases consideration, it is the past and future only.
Throughout the years T. and I dated in Chicago, two things occurred that confused me about love:
On certain nights I would have love for her more intense than I had ever felt for another living thing.
On other nights I felt anger towards her, felt nostalgia for C., who I thought, often drunkenly, was my soulmate—communicating to me in dreams, or happenstance signs I’d see on the interstate, or by some other nonsense.
I had felt emotionally taken, led astray by a different beautiful girl—that is what alcohol had convinced me to believe. It erased time as an agent of change. I lost love because of outside forces, not because of a necessary piece of reality fabric in everyone’s life.
I remember a portion of the lawsuit I used as part of my audit support—coming across it as “Buffalo Buffalo” played into my headphones.
Claimant’s responsibility lay upon her caretakers. [Hotel] did not have terms in which they were responsible for any individual in their hotel who wanders outside of the premises—claim to be reduced by $8m as their sole responsibility was only to observe her to confirm she was within the hotel, not responsibility for her safety after leaving.
Dylan, screaming into my ears: “We'll escape into the winter / Build a house where no one / No one wants to ever go,” as I write down my audit findings, confirming a lack of an exception to the overall audit. No financial misstatement. Just a misread of a court document. Legalese confuses anyone, even the ones writing it.
It would be irresponsible and dishonest of me to accuse audit work of pushing me deeper into the bottle, but it was awful work to expose oneself to, that early, not fully developed in the brain.
It, coincidentally, was Chicago winter during the audit.
January, maybe it was February. There wasn’t anywhere to escape — Lake Michigan had cast cascades of ice all over Lakeshore Drive. I worked 80~ hours a week on average. I cared for a woman I loved, who seemed hellbent on hating herself. We both drank almost every night. Winter forever. I wrote more than 15 pieces in varying quality, all about walking into the lake, a classic metaphor for depressive Chicago-based artists.
That Spring, in 2020, after the audit had finished, I broke up with T.
In the emotional whirlwind that defined our time in love, she threatened suicide by tossing herself off our balcony. I asked her if she meant it. She said she did. I took her to the hospital.
They kept her there under watch. I spoke with her parents, who lived in Kentucky, to explain the situation. I remember apologizing to her parents on the phone so much, for not loving their daughter.. It sounds so outrageous to explain now.
After she was out, I moved back home to Kentucky. She stayed living in our apartment, her dad (very kindly) fronting my portion of the remaining two months of rent.
Real Time had stopped, the past closed.
Since then, it has felt like the weirdness of being drunk, even though I’ve stopped drinking in the past few years. I have a girlfriend, Elspeth, who I very often think of as my guardian angel that God allows me to date. Without her, I would be stuck crying, drinking cheap beer, forever 21, maybe dead.
I leave Spanish Love Songs’ set at the halfway point.
I felt sick from smoking, my legs ached, out of breath from moshing to—just one song!—of Oso Oso’s, continually typing this… thing on my iPhone.
My review? I thought it was a pleasant show. Warsaw could improve, I think, their sound design. Much of Jade’s vocal delivery was drowned by reverb in non-proofed walls. I remember myself screaming to each song. I hope to see a show like that again. I hope to remember.
Addendum
In an interview with Dork Magazine last year, Dylan Slocum of Spanish Love Songs stated,
If I was constantly worried about the past, I would be a wreck. I’m really not concerned with looking back because there are so many things that you might do differently; it could drive you insane.